Coming to a Rooftop Near You: A UFO-Spotting Spycam

An ex-spook made an incredible claim about aliens last week. David Charles Grusch, a former official with the U.S. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office, told The Debrief that the feds possess what the publication described as “intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin.”

But there’s a catch: There’s no actual evidence to back up Grusch’s claim. No evidence that the government is sitting on a bunch of derelict alien spacecraft. And no evidence aliens even exist, for that matter. Worse for Fox Mulder-style true believers, no one’s even looking for extraterrestrials near Earth—at least not with any real scientific rigor.

That last caveat is about to change. Harvard physicist Avi Loeb and his alien-hunting startup, the Galileo Project, is building what they hope will be a global network of skyward-pointing sensors whose purpose is to scan, look, and listen for UFOs—or, to borrow the in-vogue and official U.S. government term, Unexplained Aerial Phenomena (UAP).

“We want to cover the entire sky at all times with multiple sensors—so that we will not be fooled by just one of them—and classify objects based on their image and trajectory in the sky,” Loeb told The Daily Beast.

By “objects,” Loeb means everything that travels through the sky for as long as the sensor network is operational, including potentially quadrillions of birds, balloons, airplanes, and drones just going about their mundane business. Anything the sensors detect that doesn’t fall into these known categories, though, could be “something unfamiliar,” according to Loeb.

“Something unfamiliar” just might be aliens and would warrant follow-on investigation—or so goes the thinking behind Galileo’s sensor system.

The system’s design is just as ambitious as its aim. Galileo’s first observatory, installed on the roof of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, includes: a radar for actively detecting flying objects at night and in bad weather; a passive receiver that can detect a flying object’s own onboard radar; acoustic sensors that listen for sounds of passing objects; as well as optical and infrared cameras that look to the skies for glimpses of something zooming past.

Think of it as the technological equivalent of our senses of touch, sound, and sight. “The instrumentation suite is designed to cast a wide net with a fine mesh using parallel and simultaneous measurements with a high degree of self-corroboration,” Loeb and dozens of coauthors wrote in a peer-reviewed study that was published in the Journal of Astronomical Instrumentation last month.

Loeb and his team consulted with Jacob Haqq-Misra, an astrobiologist with the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science in Seattle—and Misra signed off on the sensor suite’s design. “I do think the instrument suite is well-designed for the intention of identifying aerial anomalies,” Misra told The Daily Beast.

Even surveilling just a small swathe of the sky with a high degree of fidelity requires overlapping setups observing the same air space from separate angles and “measuring distances by triangulation using multiple sensors at different positions,” Loeb said.

Monitoring the entire planet around the clock could take hundreds, if not thousands, of observatories. They would need constant upkeep. They’d also require a powerful computer back-end: vast data storage plus A.I.-driven software for analyzing countless sightings.

“Where are they going to get money for that?” asked Seth Shostak, a scientist at the California-based SETI Institute who has advised Galileo but questions some aspects of the project’s plan. The first rooftop observatory alone cost $250,000. That would increase by orders of magnitude in order to cover enough of the sky in order to effectively monitor for UAPs.

If anyone can scare up money for a longshot effort to detect aliens, though, it’s Loeb. Arguably the most accomplished scientist in the fast-growing field of UAP-detection, Loeb has proved he can organize—and secure funding for—ambitious scientific expeditions.

This summer Loeb is leading a team to Papua New Guinea to search for fragments of a very strange meteorite that impacted just off the coast of the tiny Pacific country in 2014. A meteorite Loeb believes could contain fragments of alien technology. Loeb swiftly pulled in $1.5-million for that expedition.

“Usually what we do is dedicate a lot of effort to get funders excited,” Loeb said. “It was different on this. People approached me and said, ‘We like what you’re doing.’”

But paying for hundreds or thousands of $250,000-a-pop sensor suites is a financial problem on a potentially multi-billion-dollar scale. Besides, there might be an easier, cheaper way of scanning Earth’s atmosphere for signs of possible UAPs, Shostak said.

Instead of starting on the ground and gazing upward, an alien-detecting sensor network could start in orbit and gaze downward. “We have something like 800 operational satellites orbiting Earth,” Shostak said. “Many, maybe most, aim downward with cameras.”

“Why not just get a student to write software to look through all this data?” Shostak asked. “Is there anything flying around that’s anomalous? That strikes me as a better approach.”

Of course, many of those 800 satellites belong to private companies or military space agencies that might not be eager to just give away data. All the same, Loeb agreed that a space-based approach could complement the ground-based sensors.

To that end, the Galileo Project has cut a deal with San Francisco-based satellite-operator Planet Labs to access top-down imagery for some of the world’s more remote areas, where ground-based observatories might be difficult to install, maintain, and monitor like the Sahara Desert and the Amazon rainforest, for starters.

A truly worldwide, around-the-clock, alien-detecting sensor network might be unaffordable. And borrowing satellite imagery might not make it much cheaper. So it’s not hard to imagine Galileo’s global sensor network turning into a regional or even local one.

But even a small network is better than nothing, and would represent a huge improvement over the existing approach to spotting UAPs: random civilians point cellphone cameras at objects flitting overhead, or military pilots blowing the whistle about mysterious blips on their radar screens.

Galileo’s single rooftop setup, complemented by a bit of satellite imagery, is already adding scientific rigor to the decades-old practice of staring into the sky in the hope of glimpsing a UFO–er, UAP. “We already have more data than in all UAP reports of the past,” Loeb said.

That’s a far cry from proving ex-spook Grusch’s wild claim that the feds have already found and captured alien craft. But it’s a start.